


Nine Good Books

by viklikesfic (v_angelique)



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-02
Updated: 2007-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-05 22:58:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v_angelique/pseuds/viklikesfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I had originally written these nine drabbles (very loosely defined as such in terms of length) just for fun, as a variation on <a href="http://telesilla.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://telesilla.livejournal.com/"><b>telesilla</b></a>'s form as evidenced by the excellent "Nine Different Cooks."  However, it took me a while to edit and I've decided to use it for my first contribution to <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/14valentines/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/14valentines/"><b>14valentines</b></a>, as well, in an attempt to go beyond the actual challenge and match the theme of each story to the topic for the day.  So this is for "academics," the February 1st topic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nine Good Books

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider donating your time to a tutoring or adult literacy program, or teaching English as a Second Language as a volunteer. For my other contributions, I will provide a link to an organisation you can donate to, but many of you don't have the money to contribute to charity, so I will strongly recommend volunteering, instead. I've always found tutoring to be a rewarding experience, and you can learn so much more from teaching than you do from being a student.

A friend of John's sent him A.S. Byatt's _Possession_ when he got back to New Zealand after Christmas holiday. The romance was really a joke gift, but the others found him laughing occasionally in that delightfully jolly deep tone of his, his eyes bright as he followed Roland through his uneasy search for knowledge in the Victorian ramblings of Randolph Henry Ash, and they teased him mercilessly. John took it all in stride, though, and didn't comment when certain hobbits were found snogging behind the makeup trailer. It wasn't really worth the trouble.

* * *

 

Billy didn't know the origin of the first edition of Macbeth that he received by post one Wednesday, but the note inside said "A copy of the Scottish play for my favourite Scot," and Billy couldn't help but reread it, giving his cast mates surreptitious glances to see if anyone was watching him closer than usual. Couldn't be Elijah or Astin or Viggo, unless they had adopted British spelling to throw him off, and the handwriting was very plain, presumably not the genuine script of the writer. He found himself quoting lines on breaks, though, and he remembered the theatres in which he'd performed with a surge of happy nostalgia.

* * *

 

Ian was reading Foucault's _History of Sexuality_, all three volumes, in French. Anyone who noticed this was duly impressed, but Ian had taken it on as a challenge. His school French was rusty, not really improved by a few trips to Cannes and the odd holiday in Nice. He also was hoping, perhaps, that Foucault might be a bit more digestible in his native tongue. Somehow, he got through all three, and at the end, when asked about them, harrumphed good-naturedly and said that Foucault evidently possessed a natural aversion to the art of making any sense whatsoever. And that was that.

* * *

 

Elijah liked comic books. It was a childhood thing, one last vestige for a boy who couldn't go to public school or join after-school groups or be a Boy Scout. His mother shipped all of his old Superman copies to New Zealand as a birthday present after Christmas holiday, and he devoured them eagerly, for the millionth time. He always liked Superman—the boy who fell out of the sky and grew up in the Midwest, only to make it to the big city and suddenly be a hero. When Elijah was in the DJ booth, anonymously playing his mixes in one club or the other, he sometimes used the name "DJ Kent," as an inside joke that only he understood.

* * *

 

Sean Astin was reading _Harry Potter_. Everyone knew this, and everyone liked to tease, but he wasn't ashamed of the fact that he was clearly way ahead of his daughter in the series, now on the just-released _Goblet of Fire_. It was good for a parent to know what they were reading to their child, he reasoned, and then when no one was paying any attention he wrote a fan letter to Mrs. Rowling. "Dear J.K., I was thinking maybe you could improve upon the whole Voldemort thing by having him discover his own inadequacy in a classic battle of good and evil, sort of a Star Wars scenario…"

* * *

 

Elijah was reading _Cooking for Dummies_, but he tried whenever possible to keep it hidden on an out-of-the way shelf or underneath the bed. He didn't want anyone else to know how much his newfound adult bachelorhood terrified him, or how the first time he had been confronted with the task of shopping alone, in a foreign grocery store, for dinner, he had caved and bought a pack of mince pies and a bottle of wine and proceeded to burn the roof of his mouth after setting the oven temperature to what seemed a proper level—three hundred and fifty degrees… Celcius.

* * *

 

Sean Bean didn't read much. He couldn't read on planes, as he preferred to conk himself out with about a half a litre of gin before he left the ground, and otherwise he was too busy between acting, getting the divorce worked out, and reading scripts to bother. However, when Viggo passed him a copy of _The Catcher in the Rye,_ which he had admittedly never read, he humoured him. And afterwards, he found Viggo in the makeup trailer, and pressed a kiss to his cheek, and said he felt better. Viggo just smiled.

* * *

 

Viggo himself could never choose just one book to read. At the moment, he was balancing three—one was a collection of Neruda's sonnets, in Spanish, which he sometimes whispered to himself late at night, his hand on his cock, imagining a dream-lover that was starting to look frighteningly like one of his cast mates. Another was Anthony Bourdain's _Kitchen Confidential_, which had just come out. He was planning to pass it along to Dom when he finished. And the third was _On the Road_, an old favourite, just for fun.

* * *

 

Dom, on the other hand, was working his way through a very different stack of books. After _Identifying the Perfect Scotch Whisky_ and the official fan's guide to the Glasgow Rangers, he moved on to _The Modern Lover: A Playbook for Suitors, Spouses, and Ringless Carousers._ Many of the tips were tame and essentially expected, but one page on "The Flogger" did give him pause. He consulted "The Sign of the Kink" section with interest and found that, "the noble Lion deserves a radiant new hide of latex to rule over the other big cats." He tried to imagine Billy in latex, and then found his own horoscope. "Cuff the jaunty Archer before he exhausts his quiver without restraint." Tugging on leather wrist cuffs, he sighed and went to go see how Billy was doing with _Macbeth._


End file.
